模倣子 Notation and Dynamics of Alliance Theory

Memetic Index -- Footnotes 

Introduction

My idea is that the filling out the notation and basic structure of alliance theory will lead to being able to move forward and accommodate data after the fact. The idea is that allies deploy memes which help their beneficiaries get to good states or avoid bad states, and possibly create new states for them to get to.

Another theory, which may have a lot in common, is Oppression Theory, where oppressors take the same role as allies (benefactors) to prevent good things from happening, cause bad things to happen, and create negative states. This is for later. Hopefully, once the notation and fundamental structural dynamics of alliance theory are in place, they will transfer directly to oppression theory.

What Does an Ally Do? 

The 2nd Law of Macromemetics states that deployment of a meme leads to a state transition. T.his suggests several possibilities. When an agent deploys a meme, the system transitions to a new state:

State1.any-agent.meme1! => State2    (fig 1.)

In order for a protegee to have a different outcome, they would have to transition to a different state:

State1.protegee.meme1! => State2a      (fig 1.a.)

How does an ally accomplish this? Looking at a transition matrix model, this would involve somehow substituting State2a for State2 in the transition matrix for State1. This is a mutation of the previous transition matrix (as defined by the 3rd Law of Macromemetics).

We could say that the "goal" of any agent, including the protegee, is to get to some final state, State3, which could mean getting a job, getting a college admission, avoiding some police action, or so on. This could look like either:

State2.any-agent.meme2! => State3               (fig 2.a-e.)
State2.protegee.meme2! => State3
State2.protegee.meme3! => State3
State2a.protegee.meme2! => State3
State2a.protegee.meme2a! => State3

An Immunomemetic Perspective 

I recently came up with a notation for immunomemetic interactions where we pile up the meme deployments in a long string. For example, a regular agent making his or her way from the initial state to the final, success, state would look like:

State1.any-agent.meme1!meme2! => State3     (fig. 3.)

For our protegee agent, we have to resolve some of the disparate conditions above. We were positing the ideas that due to the intercession of the ally the protegee might either go to a new state State2 as the result of deploying meme1 or go to some new state, State2a, that other agents don't get to go to, that is:

State1.protegee.meme1! => State2            (fig. 4.a, b.)
State1.protegee.meme1! => State2a

There is of course nothing wrong with different agents deploying different memes to go to the same state, just not the same agent deploying the same meme in the same state and going to different new states, because if there were some special differences that predicated such a forked transition, it would mean there were actually two different states, not one. Hense the deployment descriptors in fig. 4a. and 4b. are mutually exclusive. However, we could add an immunomemetic notation indicating the intercessory action of an ally:

State1.protegee.meme1! => State2                         (fig. 5a, b)
State1.protegee.meme1!ally.help1! => State2b    (1)

Alternatively the protegee could reach State2, and then be helped to State3 by helpful action by the ally. We could imagine things like "getting from State2 to State3 is hard"

State1.protegee.meme1!meme2!ally.help2! => State3   (fig. 5c)

Okay, just to clarify and reïterate, according to the 2nd Law of Macromemetics, a successful meme deployment results in a state change, but there is a competition among the eligible agents for the successful deployment that leads to the ultimate state transition. Whoever gets the clever comment out first gets credit and controls which state the group goes to next (which is automatically determined by the meme deployment), which usually puts said successful agent in the catbird seat for him or her (or his or her allies) to deploy additional memes which further enhance his or her status and standing. Hence, when we talk about the weights associated with which agents are most likely to deploy a meme and leverage a transition, the high-status agents are necessarily at an advantage. Let's take another look at an immunomemetic expression of the deployment pathways that a regular schmoe agent and a protegee agent could take to State3, the State of Success:

State1.any-agent.meme1!meme2! => State3                  (fig. 6a)
State1.protege.meme1!ally.help1!meme2a! => State3      (fig. 6b)
State1.protege.meme1!meme2!ally.help2!  =>  State3     (fig. 6c)

Deployment theory (2) holds that there are weights and probabilities associated with deployment decisions, and then there are race conditions and "jinx events" (4). For example, it may be useful to say that there is a 100% chance that given a certain memetic state (a collection of agents all in contact and each with deployment opportunities) some memetic deployment will take place, in some, perhaps many, social situations, that deployment is "no meme gets deployed" (5). 

Concrete Example: A Job Application Process

Let's imagine a company that accepts job applications, chooses one (or zero) from the stack to interview, and then there is some chance that an interviewed candidate may be hired. For example, applicant agent schmoe applies for the job in the hope of getting interviewed, as follows:

Apply.schmoe.apply! => Interviewed        (fig. 7)

We take P(State.agent.meme!) as the probability that a given meme will be successfully deployed at a given "memetic deployment juncture" (6). For example, P(Apply.schmoe.apply!) is the probability that agent "schmoe" will have his or her application accepted for an interview. Let's also say that P(Apply.company.no-action!) is the probability that the company takes no action on the outstanding applications on a given day. Hence we could have the following scenario where two resumes are in the inbox:

P(Apply.schmoe1.apply!) = 10%            (fig. 8)
P(Apply.schmoe2.apply!) = 10%
P(Apply.company.no-action!) = 80%

So there's only a 20% chance that anybody will be interviewed today. Each prospective interviewee has a 10% chance of being chosen, and this would be less if there were more applicants. Now we have a protegee of an ally who works at (or has influence at) the company. Normally we'd have:

P(Apply.protegee.apply!) = (100% - P(company.no-action!)) / # of resumes      (fig. 8b)

but we want to see something like: 

P(Apply.protegee.apply!ally.help1!) = 90%                     (fig. 8c)
P(company.no-action!ally.help1!) = 10%. 

You could perhaps still give the other applicants a fraction of the 10%, too, for example.

People who pass their interview are now eligible for a job when one comes up. The path to employment looks like:

Interviewed.schmoe.hire! => Hired     (fig. 9)

We're leaving out time considerations (6), that is, how an ally might be able to make things move a little faster. Our model effectively does the same thing. Even if there is no protegee getting fast-tracked in the resume inbox or in the hiring pool, a regular schmoe faces delays from the fact that the company may take no action most of the time, and that one is in competition with many other applicants. For instance, if the company is 70% likely to not perform interviews on a given day, or give jobs to people who have been interviewed, and if an average of three people have applied, or have been interviewed, at any given time, then there's only a 10% chance you will be chosen.  That translates into a 1% chance that you will make it all the way through the process in a shortest path. Assuming time spent sitting in the pool of applicants or interviewees doesn't decrease one's chances, just over a week (being passed up about three times in each pool) starts to look like about 3% chance of getting a job.

By contrast, if having an ally gives you a 90% chance of passing each of the two processes, then you have an 81% chance of getting through the whole process at the fastest possible speed.

Immunomemetic Notation

I call the notation "immnomemetic" because it mirrors a way of denoting immunomemes which I have recently developed. For example, if an agent (person) called schlemazel is at a party and tells a bad joke, getting no response from his fellow partygoers, we could denote it thusly:

Party.schlemazel.bad-joke! => Crickets     (fig. 10a)

However, if another partygoer, a bully, mocks schlemiel for his bad joke, we have:

Party.schlemazel.bad-joke!bully.mock! => Derision   (fig. 10b)

Telling a (bad) joke, or indeed any "risky" social is what we call a "bullying opportunity," or a chance for another agent to deploy an "immunomeme" (7). That can further give other agents space to deploy additional immunomemes.

Party.schlemazel.bad-joke!bully.mock!others.[mock!,deride!] => Pariah     (fig. 10c)

This notation is a shorthand which effectively hides the states along the way. It can also be a notation for compelled states (10). There do not appear to be any compelled states in our party gaffe scenario, since we can write it out in long form:

Party.schlemazel.bad-joke! => Crickets     (fig. 11a-d)
Crickets.bully.mock! => Derision
Derision.others.mock! => Pariah
Derision.others.deride! => Pariah

The immunomemetic notation allows us to express a series of meme deployments, and the states they drive us through (but about which we don't really care) as a single meme connecting only two states, with a probability of that meme being successfully deployed given the current state. We can then think in clear terms about the probability of success of a given meme deployment versus the probablity of a successful immunomemetic counter-deployment (8).

This notation would seem to work well with alliance theory. An ally deploys a meme in response to a protegee's deployment, and the probability of success is modified favorably, like we see in figures 8b and 8c. In our party example, our friend schlemazel could have a "sakura" (11) in the group who would either laugh! or groan! at the bad-joke! to potentially elicit more favorable response from the audience and defeat any immunomemetic attempts.

Party.schlemazel.bad-joke!sakura.[laugh!,groan!] => JokeReceived    (fig. 12a-c)

JokeReceived.others.[laugh!,groan!] => StatusUp

JokeReceived.[bully,others].[ignore!,mock!] => JokeReceived

So we can say something like:

P(Party.schlemiel.bad-joke!)  is low,               while...                 (fig. 12d,e)
P(Party.schlemiel.bad-joke!sakura.[laugh!,groan!] is high.

One other property of immunomemes is that they are highly resonant (8). An immunomeme has the effect of diverting the system very reliably to a "safe state" thereby subverting an agent's attempt to deploy a novel meme and take the system to either a novel state, or to a state which the agent does not normally have access due to his or her status (MADSAM), in other words introduce a mutation into the memeplex (12). Similarly, we expect alliance memes to be highly resonant as well, i.e., not likely to fail when deployed.

The concept of "highly resonant" or "very likely to succeed" may still need more careful definition. The reality is that agents typically deploy memes with a high degree of confidence of success, i.e., that the state transition they are aiming for will be met. However, most agents don't deploy any memes, or memes which make little change to the state of the system, so that's not saying much. Immunomemes stand out because of their aggressive nature (although they are very common) and alliance memes stand out because they can potentially cause large shifts to the system (certainly for the protegee in question).

In summary, the notation for immunomemes seems to work for alliances as well.

What Does the Ally Get Out of It? 

This is a good question, which merits an entire essay of its own. We could especially use some anecdotal data to do with mentors and protegees (13) to get some actual test cases to see what's really going on. Having said that, the simple fact of being able to deploy a meme that is guaranteed to land is solid gold. Is that a particular property of an ally meme? If that can be clearly demonstrated, i.e., that an ally meme has this same, strange, fundamental property of immunomemes, i.e., that they are guaranteed to succeed, then this could be a valuable insight.

If this is true, it could have to do with closure (14). That may be a necessary and sufficient description of the action of an immunomeme. The morphology of the meme itself is very clear (16), it's well-marked, and it has good closure. It becomes almost like conservative financing. Deploying memes that help allies, if they are like immunomemes, then they yield reliable rewards, and all that is needed is a crop of protegees to allow the ally to deploy them.

In sum, being able to deploy additional memes is always a plus. Agents always want access to more memes. This is easier said than done. Being able to deploy a meme doesn't just mean you have to learn it, there have to be lots and lots of others who are able to resonate with it. 

It could be that memes to help others doesn't involve all that many novel memes. The memetic pathways may be mostly all there. This is a critical point. The principle that agents seek meme addition is sound, basic. The idea that alliance activities may provide this is an interesting theory, but it would be good to back it up with some data.

Summary & Conclusions 

A lot of these ideas need to be backed up by more study, research, and data.

Notation-wise, alliance memes may look a lot like immunomemes. That makes it straightforward to at least write down alliance systems using existing notation and model them with existing tools.

Immunomemes and alliance memes may have even more in common.

Immunomemes appear to have the basic property of having good marking and closure, and also are reliable sources of memetic reward (18). Alliance memes appear to have this same property. With immunomemes one is waiting for others to break the rules to deploy, while with alliance memes one needs an influx of people needing help.  Alliance memes potentially have very high rewards, lots of high-yield memes involved (in existing pathways) that are already in place. This needs to be elaborated, and data gathered to see if there are examples of this mechanism at work. The pretendian phenomenon could be an interesting case study (13).

In short, some interesting starts on some theoretical models. No roadblocks yet about how alliance systems might work. It would be good to get real-world data.

____________

Footnotes

(1) See Dining Philosophers essay. A "compelled state" is one in which the agent cannot remain for any duration, and from which there are limited meme deployments available to exit to other states.

(2) Deployment theory refers to the decision process whereby a system determines which meme is going to be deployed by which agent, thereby leading to the next state of the system. It's about modeling what really happens. One idea is to involve endomemetic theory (3)

(3) Endomemetic theory, which also relates to macromemetic modeling of psychology, is where we posit the presence of a memetic system inside every agent, that maintains its own state, that generates deployment decisions. 

(4) A "jinx event" is where two or more agents try to deploy a meme (possibly the same one) at the same time, producing some kind of collision. Part of deployment theory (2) has to do with deciding which agent gets to "push the Jeopardy! button." It could well be that even if temporally multiple agents deploy memes, it's really the exposed cohort that decides which state the fabric transitions to. Remember that things like deployment theory and state transition models are just that, simple computational models for something that is very analog, very parallel.

(5) No meme getting deployed is in many cases acts as if one did, in terms of state transitions. I trot out my example of a nudist colony, where taking all your clothes off would normally elicit a big response, but at the nudist colony no response is the desired memetic resonance.

(6) A memetic deployment juncture is a loose term for the idea that there is a kind of "clock" associated with a model of a memetic system. There's a kind of assumption that agents are in a "wait state" for much of the time until the machine moves forward a notch. Things like the game of baseball and Robert's Rules of order and The Dining Philosophers problem (1) are fun to use as simplified systems since they have this property built in. The system is always in a well-defined state, and which agents are allowed to do what in each state.

(7) A bullying opportunity opens up a chance ot deploy an immunomme. The First Law of Immunomemetics states that any stable memeplex contains an immunomemeplex with memes that support the stability of the memeplex (8), that is, impeding the modification, addition, deletion, substitution, of a state, agent, or meme (MADSAM) of the memetic matrix. In other words, an attempt to de-assert an existing meme, or deploy a novel meme, is met with an immunomemetic deployment.

(8) Going back to probabilities of meme deployments, the would-be deployer of self.meme! weighs the likely success of said deployment against the probability of self.meme!bully.immunomene! and which state that counterdeployment will lead to. For instance:

BeginState.self.meme! => IncreasedStatus
BeginState.self.meme!bully.immunomeme! => LostStatus

Human beings (and other animals) are good at predicting these kinds of outcomes. It's a gamble between the probability that self.meme! will resonate and that self.meme!bully.immunomene will be deployed (and resonate). One thing about immunomemes is that they have a high degree of resonance (otherwise they wouldn't be very good immunomemes, right?) They don't expose the deployer to much risk of immunomemetic retaliation themselves. We have something like:

"likely success"  1 < P(self.meme!) / P(self.meme!bully.immunomeme!) < 1  "likely oppression" (9)

(9) Here we start to see a working definition of "oppression." If agent tries to deploy memes that lead to a better status, that is, better and better opportunities to deploy more memes that benefit the agent. However, deploying memes that make this less likely, or by providing bullying opportunities that lead to the deployment of immunomemes, tends to take the agent in the opposite direction. "Oppression" exists when an agent has few opportunities to deploy memes that improve his or her situation, or provide lots of bullying opportunities. Of course, bullying opportunity memes are better than alienation (memetic destitution), which leads directly to violence.

(10) A compelled state (see Glossary) is a state from which the system must immediately depart, and which typically has only one deployable meme (though a choice is not excluded). In other words and for example, an agent is placed in a state where they are forced to immediately perform on and only one meme. As a side note "Agents hate to be put into compelled states." In terms of policy and engineering of memetic systems, the preceding statement is right up there with "memetic destitution (alienation) leads to violence."

(11) A "sakura" is the Japanese word for "a plant," accomplice, shill, or somebody in the audience in kahoots with the speaker to help them get laughs or ask helpful qeustions.

(12) See MADSAM in Introduction to Macromemetics. The Third Law of Macromemetics defines a mutation to a memeplex as the Modification, Addition, or Deletion of a State, Agent, or Meme, and this is precisely what immunomemes work to prevent such mutations (3rd Law of Immunomemetics).

(13) Pretendianism is an interesting case because of a number of reasons. The benefactor actions should be easy to tease out. It's an obscure niche issue, so there should be fewer global social biases to obscure or blur the transactions taking place. Furthermore, it's a fundamentally fraudulent situation, but the dupery is cloaked by ignorance of, or pretensions of ignorance of, Native American culture. Hence, Real Natives (or their allies) are able to perceive the fraud in sharp relief. In sum, lots of good, clean data which slots right into our area of research. 

(14) Closure closely related to marking (15). is the property of a memetic deployment that it is clear (or unclear) as to whether the transaction has been completed or not, or only partially.

(15) Marking is the property of a meme that it is easy or difficult to tell that a meme has been deployed, and, by extension, that an acceptable reply or response has been made to said meme.

(16) Some typical immunomemes include "We already talked about that," "And he's talking about [this] again," "that will never work," and such. These memes are fairly dumb. There are more sophisticated ones (17).

(17) A potentially interesting line of research into immunomemes (or memes in general, including notation) may be "joke analysis." Simple joke forms like knock-knock jokes and "a guy walks into a bar" jokes, and "what do you call a..." jokes may shine light on parameterized memes and immunomemes.

(18) Memetic reward is the physiological reward that an agent receives when a memetic loop, a memetic transation, is closed and completed. Also known as a memetic orgasm.

模倣子 The Romance of Time Travel

 Memetic Index

I think my next novel will be about time travel, and a romance. I think I will include a kind of time travelers’ 🧳 🕰 pub where time travelers from all times and dimensions meet for business meetings and just to hang out. The goal of the universe the story might be to improve the species, to “rescue” exceptional individuals from being trapped in time. That might be a bad premise, however. 

Anyway…

Would time travel being possible violate the Anthropic Principle (weak or strong) ?

Or is that a dumb question?

I’ve been pondering the questions. Interesting. Why do you think it might violate it?

I was watching The History of Time  Travel 🧭 🧳 All the various (minute physics also discusses all of the narrative models for time travel) paradoxes that can come up from time travel and how it messes with stuff like entropy and consciousness…

Humans produce artifacts, and those could get caught in strange infinite loops and such. I was just thinking that there might be basic pillars of human existence that might be fundamentally undermined if time travel were possible 

Kind of like living creatures can only exist in 3D universes, not 2D, and 4D is right out. (Three macroscopic dimensions, that is, for all you string theorists out there) So in a sense allowing time travel 🧳 🕰 is like adding another dimension (I just thought of that) And in a 4D universe, you can’t have a functioning GI tract.

Have you watched The History of Time Travel 🧳? Prime video and I think HBO Max. It’s clever. It outlines all the kinds of time travel models through historical “interviews” with experts and the story is mutating as it goes along. 

The nth time I was watching it, it occurred to me that “history” would be too unstable for humans to exist. 

It’s kind of like the movie 🎥 Millennium — how time travelers can only exist if they can be unseen 

Millennium 🎞 is another classic to check out. 

There’s Stephen Hawking’s time travelers’ party, 🎈 which he advertised after it has already taken place  🍾 I was thinking that might be a fun 📕 involving a pub somewhere where time travelers 🧳 hang out during their missions and stuff. That might be my next book. A romantic time travel book. Time travel is a deeply romantic theme, ❤️ 

Interesting way to avoid time travel paradoxes:  to only allow it if it can’t be observed… (1) 

Since it contains the sense of loss, of missed opportunity, and the desperate hope of cheating fate, second chances (a deeply romantic ❤️ idea 💡) Yes, that’s the whole plot of millennium— it’s okay 👌🏾 if it can’t be observed. That’s kind of a macroscopic quantum mechanical thing again. We like 👍🏻 that 😄 

Is that “observability” issue how you were tying time travel to the anthropic principle?  That if we observe each other and time travel violations require “un-observability”, then we must not live in that kind of universe…

Hawking’s party 🎈 kind of gave me the idea 💡 for the time bandit pub (also Deadpool’s Sister Margaret’s bar for mercenaries) 

Yes, I like what you said about the observation requirement. That didn’t occur to me until you suggested it. I was thinking that paradoxes would unravel our perceptions, something like that. 

Anyway, bon appétit 😋 🥘 

A fun angle to add to the time travel narrative could be an environmental apocalypse angle. (2) Like time-traveling agents and spies 🕵️‍♀️ of multiple governments (even extraterrestrial 👽 ones) could be moving between “branes” and times trying to do something. Possibly even rescue individuals from their own timelines, possibly even for breeding purposes. And of course there would be a memetic angle 📐 to it all. 

The Forever War is like Starship Troopers but with real physics, to wit, time dilation.  Not to spoil it, but the main characters go from near future to millennia in the future… Passing through centuries-long periods where Earth 🌍 “went 100% homosexual” to deal with overpopulation, for instance. Mixed gender crews went through the centuries together. If somebody got transferred you never saw them again. They or you would be long-dead by next planetfall 🪐 and that planet 🌏 would be totally different from the last time you saw it. It might’ve fallen into enemy hands for decades and then been retaken. 

I was just cut-pasting our exchange about time travel 🧭 🧳 into a document

I think it’s really starting to shape up into a romance. Have you seen the Vat of Acid Episode of Rick and Morty? It’s a kind of romance. I’m thinking of mixing in elements of Millennium 📀 🤖 The Forever War 🚀 Hawking’s Time travelers’ party 🎈 and also About Time (with Domhill Gleason). I should probably watch The Lakehouse 📫  and The Time Traveler’s Wife. 

I’ve been kicking around your mention of non-observability 👀 🕰 criterion for successful time travelers 🧳 

Everybody seems to think 🤔 that time has to behave in a “certain way” where it might be possible that time travel that does not create a paradox does not create a branching 🌳 alternate time line (no “many worlds” 🌍 🪐 🌎 ) but a paradox-creating trip 🚂 🧳 causes a 🌳 branch. Kind of macroscopic quantization-like (two-slut experiment 🔬) 

From a romantic narrative standpoint, two people are trying to resolve their romantic problems and reach happen end live together. But they may have to sacrifice other versions of themselves, friends, even children 👧 as they switch and abandon timelines, sometimes unavoidably, but sometimes deliberately. Maybe even assassinating ☠️ copies of oneself in other timelines in order to bring knowledge and position from other timelines. The couple is traveling through time, but some instances could be stuck in time, ie, not trained by the time travel 🧭 🧳 guild, maybe there could be jewelry or a tattoo to indicate member to each other. 

What about entropy? If somebody travels back (or forward) in time, at least the matter that makes up their body would be subtracted from the present moment and added to the past point in time, and going forward. So the present universe would become less energetic (violating conservation of energy) and the past universe more energetic. And if the time trip created a paradox, then a new universe would be created, with that additional energy. 

Time traveling 🧭 🧳 forward shouldn’t be too much of a problem. But the traveler 🚀 would effectively be obliterated from the time of departure. It could be kind of a relativistic thing. They wouldn’t Leave as much as “slow down” and rude the river 💦 

Quantum Leap 📺 which I’ve never watched has the idea 💡 of a handler who handles the time traveler, so he or she is not initiating the time jumps. 

I’m imagining a scene where a couple meet in a bar and it plays out like a bowl 🥣 of peanuts 🥜 on the bar 🍻 instantaneously jumps several inches across the bar and goes from being almost empty to being full (possibly of almonds now). “That’s an example of a paradox-creating event” the time-traveler says to the non-time-traveler. 

__________

(1) a separate branching timeline is created only if a detectable action is taken by a time traveler 🧳 so two lovers can escape to a timeline where they both live happily ever after, deliberately grange ting the timeline with paradoxes  Rick and Morty did it, pretty much, in The Vat of Acid Episode.

(2) possible plot line could be finding a timeline where the world 🌎 is going to end BUT the two lovers ❤️ get to be together. Also the idea 💡 that a bunch of alters in other timelines have to sacrifice their lives and happiness to bring this about. Possibly even children of the couple, with other alters.

模倣子 Stretching to Medium Length

 Medium comments  - Memetic Index 

I wrote a more considered response just now, but it got erased, so apologies for the summary below.

My dentist told me that if you could relax the tissues enough, you could fit your hands and your feet into your mouth.

What kind of percent stretching are you talking about? Six inches to twelve, or more like ten to twelve?

Yes, I’m writing from my personal experience, as I can only assume you are.

Are we talking about the “grower vs. shower” effect here? Perhaps also insensitively called the “White Man’s Curse” or suchlike. Clearly a penis which can shrink to a fraction of its erect length is an advantage in cold climes. A well-known British Antarctic explorer (sorry, I don’t remember his name) said he wouldn’t take any more circumcised men on his adventures since they got frostbite on their glans too much. If you go on a run in sub-freezing temperatures for an hour, without a foreskin, or with a ten-inch penis that can’t shrink up close to your body, then you may hurt yourself and not even know it.

I’m not a medical person, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say “a real doozy of a medical condition.” Doug Kenney could stick his whole hand in his mouth, I don’t think I could manage it, but I wouldn’t leap to the conclusion that either of us is sick.

Again, numbers or percentages would be a big help. If you have a foreskin, then I’m not sure where you’d measure. If you don’t, then I guess you’d grab the semi-tight skin around the glans (grabbing the glans probably wouldn’t work too well). 

I should probably take a digression into the foreskin. Skin doesn’t really stretch all that much (try yanking on your earlobe). It can bunch up, which is a lot of what’s going on with the penis. The foreskin is more of a region than a flap of skin. It goes out around past the end of the glans, and then turns back in and connects around the bottom edge of the glans. That “turned back in” skin gets rolled back out, effectively doubling the “length” of the foreskin (plus the foreskin is very “bunched up” so it gets a lot longer). In other words, if you have a foreskin, then just stretching your penis by the “end” of your foreskin will probably be an inch or two shorter than your erection, since all that skin turns back in to go around your glans, skin which would roll out and down your shaft (and also unbunches a lot).

One problem circumcised men can have is that they cut off “too much” skin off the end of the penis, so there’s no longer enough to “unroll” to cover the whole length of their erection. This can result in lifelong erectile pain, among other things. I don’t know if it can result in an erection that is “shorter” than it would be otherwise. It can result in scrotal tissue being pulled up onto the shaft during erection. This raises the question (among other things ;-) of how to measure the length of the non-erect penis. The skin of the penis is not, as such, connected to the underlying spongiform erectile bodies — it slides over it. If you have a foreskin, then it’s going to give you an extra two inches, but you can kind of palpate through it to locate the glans, and whether you have a foreskin or not, stretching from the business end of the penis could still enlist scrotal skin (which is bunched up and easily stretched) and even a little of the skin superior to the penis over the pubis mons.

Anyway, blah, blah, blah. As I said, it’s problematic. It’s like comparing apples and oranges, or bananas and peeled, half-eaten bananas. A guy with a foreskin may get the same stretched length as erect length, but probably less an inch or two, a circumcised guy, who knows? I guess it’s a grower-shower thing. A guy with a restored foreskin, how far restored? All bets are off.

To paraphrase the time-worn British expression, “The proof of the pudding is in the ramming it down your throat.” I guess what I’m trying to say is that probably the only reliable way to measure an erection is by getting an erection. All this talk of stretching leads me to believe that there may be a lot of fundamental misconceptions of how this organ is made up and how it works. Half of all people have one, so there’s probably one handy near where you are right now.

So yes, again, percentages or actual measurement numbers would be helpful. Otherwise, we’re kind of in the bush here.

By the way, congrats on being of porn star proportions. I find that it’s not so much the sheer size, although that’s impressive, but the number of additional positions that become available (obviously important in the industry). Otherwise, Kama Sutra poses that require too much “travel” can result in “decoupling.” Stuff like “Vlad the Impaler” and C.A.T., for instance, may start to become impossible below six or seven inches, but of course I wouldn’t know for sure.

Seriously, though, be careful going out in sub-zero temperatures for extended lengths (of time). If you don’t have a foreskin, or your Old Fellow can’t shrink up, I’d recommend something like a jock strap and a warm sock or two.

模倣子 Defeating Defendianism Update

Memetic Essay Index  - Previous Version Dec 29

Introduction

I'll introduce a number of terms, many of them of my own invention, and I'll try to define these as well as other concepts in the footnotes at the end of this document.  I've also linked to a number of my other essays in the bibliograpy below.

I've discussed pretendiansim (28) elsewhere. I also wrote a short essay on coöption of nerd culture, which is a real issue, but also hopefully a fruitful analogue for the coöption of Native American culture by non-natives. The point is that all aspects of human behavior is governed by the laws and principles of macromemetics (29), and as such, may be attacked using macromemetic engineering techniques.

One such principle is memetic replacement or memetic atrophy (1). Invoking an undesirable meme in any way only serves to strengthen it, since it demonstrates that a memetic reward (2) may be derived from said meme. This is precisely the opposite situation the would-be memetic engineer seeks to create. So telling people "don't do that" brings up that and reënforces that in everyone's mind (3).

The First Law of Immunomemetics (30) states that any stable memetic system (21) must contain an immunomemetic system that keeps it stable, that resists change, that devalues the rewards of deployment of memes that are not part of the system, or more to the point, which are targeted by the immunomemetic system of the pretendian memeplex and the subsystems of the white memeplex that interact with the pretendian memeplex. What this means is that we must understand what those immunomemes are, in order to defeat them.

The Triple Narrative Model (4) may provide us a good way to model the pretendian megamemeplex (31), and how it interacts with the "white" megamemeplex. What does the conservative narrative have to say about Native Americans? Not much good stuff, of course. Is the defendian/pretendian submemeplex (31) an example of Liberal Narrative at work? Pretendianism may be part of an overall conservative narrative, and thus Defendianism may be a Liberal (crypto-conservative) narrative that defends against attacks on the conservative (pretendian) narrative.

Alliance Theory (5) is another concept I'm working on which may have tremendous explanatory power in terms of groups that are able to push their agendas forward against other groups who are not able to.

Whence Pretendians?

Pretendians are committing fraud in a number of different ways. This translates into an inventory (32) of memetic interactions involving publishers, university administrators, university staff, students, TV and movie producers, newspaper reporters and editors, and so on and so forth. In a perfect world in which the laws of macromemetics were somehow suspended, pretendians could be removed, fired, outed, unmasked, and so forth. Defendians are an example, an expression, if you will, of why this doesn't happen. More on this later.

Alliance theory (5) models things like how certain agents (33) are able to deploy memes that make things work that would not work without the benefactors' influence. Obviously, pretendians get short-listed for university jobs, publication contracts, book deals, and media contracts for TV and movie shows and so on. The fact that these work tells us that there is resonance among the decision makers with the kind of fake Indian memes that pretendians are putting out (7).

Now we come to the Three Narrative Model. The radical narrative is that committing genocide (on Native Americans, or others) is unacceptable, and of course the conservative narrative is full of memes and entire memeplexes that nevertheless justify this action and the ongoing actions that flow out of it. To counter the minority voices that "that genocide was bad," a Liberal Narrative was created that Native Americans should get relief (jobs, short-lists for projects, publications, etc.) and that they "are cool" and "deserve special attention." This shields the conservative narrative from immunomemetic attacks like 'we mistreated the Native Americans' with "yeah, that may be true, but they get free medicine, free university jobs, and free food, etc."

This is problematic, however. Liberal activity consists in changing the memetic configuration of those already close to the center of the system, rather than those who are to be "helped" (a need which is related to the fact that they are distant from the center, by the way). Part of the reason that the abused and/or disenfranchised need "help" is that they have relatively less memetic involvement (33), fewer memes which they may successfully deploy in order to change their own relationship to the memetic fabric (8) in terms of access to resources, which according to Alliance Theory, is critical to self-actualization, upward mobility, what-have-you. This is basically my Three Narrative Model argument about the uselessness of Liberal movements and how they ultimately only serve to strengthen, consolidate, and defend the Conservative Narrative.

Hence pretendianism. We have not sought out the Native Americans in need of help, but rather "raised the consciousness" of people close to the system of distribution of resources in a fairly generic way. "Give jobs, scholarships, etc. to people who say they are Indians," becomes the memetic subsystem which effectively smooths the gruff exterior of the preëxisting Conservative Narrative. There's always polarization (17) when such new memetic subsystems are introduced, e.g., people who think that Native Americans should be given help, and those that don't. The problem is that the "give help" faction is polarized to take some specific action in order to mark (9) their membership in said faction, as opposed to something that actually helps.

This is a subtle yet important point, and I hope that I shall be able to illuminate it. The meme "we should help Indians" splits the cohort (18) (or memetic fabric (8)) into two parts: the "we should help" and "we should not help" factions. Note that it does not create a "people who help Indians" or even "people who are able to recognize actual Indians." This gets down to some macromemetic basics, for one, marking and closure (9). "Recognizing Indians" and "helping Indians" are problematic because they tend to have poor marking, poor closure, and are hard to inject (11), which means that they are less agreeable to people who would otherwise adopt them (12). By contrast, "help/don't help" memes are readily distinguished, i.e., they have good marking and closure, and members of each are distinguished one from another. Good marking and closer also (theoretically) relates to the injectability and virility (13) of a meme. Obviously, people prefer memes that are virile and which are readily injected into other minds. Ironically, it's easier to look like you're helping Indians than it is to actually help them, and to pretend to help Indians, you need people to pretend to be Indians.

Pretendianism and the Liberal Narrative

We can see how the phenomenon of pretendianism can develop through the process of the Liberal Narrative. The Radical Narrative states that people should be treated equally and fairly, and that genocide is bad. Obviously this didn't work out too well. The Conservative Narrative is full of memetic systems that justify both the historical record and the perpetuation of the hierarchical power structures that allowed those historical events to transpire, not to mention allowing them to continue on into the future unimpeded. The Liberal narrative typically operates by selecting memes from the Conservative Narrative, like that mistreating Native Americas was okay and continues to be okay, and construct new memes either by contradicting memes from the Conservative Narrative, and/or dragging in and combining memes from the Radical Narrative. For instance, "genocide is bad," or "the historical genocide of the Native Americans was bad," and "Native Americans should be given academic positions to compensate for genocide." Of course, this and other memes imply that giving out free jobs and free medical care (which was part of the initial treaties, by the way) somehow "make up for" previous atrocities. Next the Liberal Narrative confronts all cohort members with these new "awareness-raising" memes, forcing everybody to decide whether to adopt them (or adopt their opposites).

So what? Now we look at the injections of these kinds of meme pairs into a population. With memetic injection, we worry about such things as marking and closure. Memes that are clear-cut, and which tie into lots of existing memes in the Conservative Narrative are readily accepted and spread well. Things like "recognizing who's a Native American" or "help a Native American" are not good candidates for reasons which I hope are obvious. "Give Native Americans jobs (as compensation)" however is pretty good, so long as working out who actually is a Native American isn't part of it (14). In sum, memes that get successfully injected and spread are memes that have good marking and closure, and by their very nature tend not to be those that actually help anybody.

Another critical aspect of memetic injection is resonance (15). Memes only survive and propagate if they get a reaction. This presupposes that some (large) population is familiar with the meme and are prepared to deploy one or more memes in response to it. This is helped by plugging into a system of existing memes, which of course is already widely spread, and resonates with large numbers of agents. For instance, memes such as, "Native Americans were in North America before Europeans arrived," "genocide was committed against the natives," "European descendants should compensate surviving natives," "Natives should be given preference for academic positions." Some of these might be widely accepted already, and others might be new. Every meme is going to tend to produce polarization (17).

But as I mentioned, the degree of polarlization is related to the degree of acceptance to a meme, in other words, the extent that the meme has been successfully injected into a population. If a meme is not especially virile (successful), then it will not polarize a very large swath of a cohort (18), or memetic fabric. So we might posit that the Pretendian Memeplex (21) is more viable than the "really do things to help Native Americans" memeplex (the Really Help Memeplex?) or even the "do nothing" memeplex.

Alliance Theory and Pretendianism

I have just begun to delve into what I'm calling Alliance Theory. The idea is that certain memetic agents "do better" or "get further" than others, and this seems to be due to their having "allies" who either deflect attacks (immunomemes (22)) or provide an additional set of memes that allow the "beneficiary/protegée" to move between memetic states to arrive at final states more easily or gain access to states which are denied to others (23).

One question in alliance theory is why do the benefactors do what they do? Is the influence over the king they help place on the throne the reason kingmakers do what they do? Probably not always. It may always be incidental. Do they garner some kind of "reputation" with others that they have the power to make things happen? What "risks" (vulnerability to immunomemes) does an ally run?

While the motivations of the ally may be unclear, the motivations of the beneficiary would certainly seem to be. We'll try to illuminate both of these. The first thing seems to be to identify what memes are deployed to the benefit of pretendians (to the exclusion of others), and also who deploys them. One important macromemetic principle that comes into play is how to decide whom to make a beneficiary and whom not? That is, how are the beneficiaries marked? If the special favors are done in secret, then the benefactor runs more risks of attack. If they can be done in public, such that other agents have no bullying opportunities (immunomemes) to deploy, then the benefactor is able to get whatever benefits he or she gets from being a benefactor, deploying the benefactor memes, while running few if any risks.

So this discriminating meme, the memeplex that gives the benefactor "permission" to act as an ally, to choose some protegees over others, would seem to be key. As with all things, if there is good marking and closure, then the system will flourish. If everything is ad hoc and case-by-case, then it will bog down.

Benefactors of Pretendianism

This comes down to "what benefits the benefactor?" in alliances, a topic that I'm still sifting through. This may require a bit of research by people who are close to the action in university departments, publishing companies, TV and movie production companies, etc. about those who have given aid and comfort to pretendians. Which exact benefits have been conveyed to pretendians by whom? Specific anecdotes would be useful since they could inform design of macromemetic countermeasures to pretendianism and defendianism.

Why Be A Defendian?

People always like to be in a situation where they can deploy memes in the confidence they will resonate and for which there will be no immunomemetic counterattacks. In fact, it is no exaggeration to say the quest for such an idyllic situation, usually impossible (24), describes the fundamental existential crisis of the human condition. The "Karendian" meme is interesting, because it wraps itself in the trappings of "punching up" and protecting some oppressed group (in this case pretendians). Of course, pretendians are not an oppressed group. They are privileged individuals engaged in fraud, defrauding their employers and the system designed to help Real Native Americans. 

The "Karen" meme is one of a privileged person (upper-middle-class, white woman) "punching down" on people (usually of color) with less money, and more vulnerable to police mistreatment, etc. Part of this invulnerability is especially macromemetic in nature, in that the Karen is not readily counterattacked (she is "unassailable," a term I like to use in macromemetics) and her memetic inventory resonates much more strongly with the rest of society, especially with powerholders (such as the police). The "Karen Meme" turns this advantage on its head by painting the Karen (some might say rightly) as being pathologically selfish, deliberately cruel, passive-aggressive, wanton, motivated by the desire to cause harm in order to draw attention to herself.

Defendians use the Karendian Meme to try to turn the Karen Meme back on those who seek to expose pretendians (and defendians). The suggestion is that "karendians" are wanton, selfish, hurting those who don't deserve it just to draw attention to themselves. Obviously, the opposite is true. So-called karendians are not the ones "punching down;" it's the defendians and pretendians who are doing so. One could argue that telling the truth is never "punching down." The real Natives and their allies are the ones punching up. Deploying memes to do with what it means to be a real Native is an uphill battle, because not everybody knows them in any detail, most don't. Deploying memes that contradict entrenched power and privilege is also an uphill battle. None of these resonate well, certainly not universally with the people and institutions involved.

Summary & Conclusions

People like memes that have good marking and closure. They like to be sure they've seen something and be sure how they're meant to react without drawing fire from anybody else. Memes cause the polarization of memetic fabrics, and the more well-marked and the more virile (contagious) the meme, the more complete the polarization.

Native culture is like any other foreign culture: complex, unfamiliar, rife with confusing details, and we also tend to stereotype certain aspects and use them to identify said culture or group of people, i.e., contact memes (24). Contact memes are important because there is an enormous amount of widely-held stereotypes about Native American in mainstream America (the Western genre, Cowboys and Indians, the magical Indian leitmotif, omnipresent Indian place names, among many others). One macromemetic result is that fake rubbish resonates strongly with most Americans, the real stuff doesn't so much (26), which is true of everything. The point is that there's a pile of fake rubbish already there, much like with, say, France, Russia, or China, but there are millions more of those folks, and they all have nuclear weapons, which of course First Nations don't.

Liberation movements all seem to go for directly attacking the status quo, making a point that something we've all been doing for a long time is now wrong and we've got to stop doing it. Unfortunately, this makes everybody think about all of the ostensible reasons why we were doing it, even ones which weren't top-of-mind until the movement kicked it up, and now everybody's thinking about all of it, which reënforces the very memes the Liberal Narrative claims to want to eradicate. Another problem is that introducing new memes (like, "Stop doing that!") into a memetic fabric causes polarization. One effect is that part of the people say, "Yes, maybe we should stop doing it," and part say "No, let's keep doing it." (27).

A problem is that optimal meme virility, marking, injection, and polarization all conspire to produce the hiring of people who are good (enough) at pretending to be Indians via the contact memes all Americans have rather than hiring real Native Americans, and by extension, defending this practice and the people who do it (defendians). Any solution must deal with these problems, and probably won't look like "it will all be solved when everybody knows what a true Native looks like," for example.

I need more detailed anecdotal data about how pretendians have gotten their way, particularly ways in which pretendian benefactors have helped out, in detail, and the sorts of things that defendians have done. Detailed anecdotes will help in building a description of the memetic system of alliances. With this information, countermeasures may be designed and injected, and pretendianism may be torn out by the roots. I feel the macromemetical alliance system is the key. Identify as many of the memes as possible, design countermeasures in the form of immunomemes and replacement memes, inject those new memes into the system, and continue the process until people in all positions are not so much embarrassed to support and defend pretendianism (some of that, perhaps), but mainly just drawn to something else, and feeling supported by the community in that action, effectively smothering pretendianism.

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Bibliography

模倣子 Practical Memetic Engineering

模倣子 What do Memetic States Look Like?

模倣子 The Memetic Orgy of Pretendianism

模倣子 Coöption of Nerd Culture

模倣子 Cheaters, Masochists, Sociopaths, and Proselytizers

模倣子 Libidinal Bribes and Memetic Debt

模倣子 Prime Pizza Thursday

模倣子 The Dining Philosophers and Alienation

模倣子 A First Look at Memetic Alliance Theory

模倣子 The Candy Conspiracy

模倣子 Memetic Nexuses and Power

The Meme Machine, Susan Blackmore

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(1) Memetic replacement is a technique whereby new memes are engineered to replace undesirable ones. The undesirable memes are then allowed to atrophy. People do not give up memes outright, and it is difficult to shame them into not using them, because they have emotional and social investment in them and rely on them for memetic rewards (2). 

(2) Memetic reward. Humans like to exchange memes with one another. They are memetophilic. In other words, putting out (deploying) a meme and having receiving humans make some kind of memetic response gives a physiological reward, and humans cannot live without that reward. It is better to get a negative response than no response. The inability to get any response from one's fellow humans leads to violence. The feeling that one could deploy a meme and get a response, is reässuring (this has bearing on childrearing, by the way).

(3) One of the sources of strength of a given meme is the perception that everybody knows about it. The translates into the perception of a guarantee of a large reward. If I speak English in a group where I know everybody speaks it, I'm guaranteed that my message will be received. If I make a well-known political, sports, or joke reference, I'm similarly guaranteed a reward. If I make a novel reference, one that is sound, but requires thinking, I am likely not to get such a reward. Anyway, this is a fundamental principle of macromemetics.

(4) The Triple Narrative, or 3-Way Narrative Model, or Three Narrative Model contains a Radical (or Fundamental) Narrative, a Conservative Narrative, and a Liberal (or Pseudo-Liberal, Crypto-Conservative, or Status Quo Apologist) Narrative. These could also be called "the way things should be," "the way things are (or have to be)," and "the reason why things are the way they are (have to be)." The radical line is that people are all equal, everybody should have enough to eat and a place to sleep, etc., and the conservative narrative justifies the hierarchical systems that say "yes, but," and "some animals are more equal than others," and states that we will not be providing these things, and the liberal narrative is the most tricky, and defends, according to my theory, the conservative narrative even while appearing to attack/question it, based on a number of basic macromemetic principles which probably operate in a counterintuitive way to actually strengthen and consolidate the conservative narrative rather than dismantle it.

(5) Alliance Theory deals with how some memetic agents are able to succeed with the outside help from other agents while others fail without any such help (for example, getting a job, getting a book contract, or just succeeding at a task that requires some form of cooperation). I'm working on fleshing out the details how the "helpers" (allies, benefactors) also gain from the transactions, which may have something to do with memetic nexus (6).

(6) A memetic nexus is a network with a person or organization at the center to which a cohort of agents are "subscribed" by a short jump. The effect is that all subscribers are able to exchange memes, to engage in memetic interactions with one another using fresh memes coming out of the nexus, in the knowledge that all the other cohort members will be able to resonate with each other.

(7) Do real Indians get proportionally fewer jobs than pretendians? This appears to be the case. If so, this suggests that the pretend-Indian memes resonate more than real Indian memes with employment decisions.

(8) Memetic Fabric is a collection of "memetically interconnected" minds. Minds that are able to exchange memes with one another, i.e., are not cut off from one another. This implies, also that said minds have at least some memes in common (like a language). It can be a cohort (or minds, i.e., people, typically) that are connected by geography, same building, same company, commonly used network, game application, culture, etc.

(9) Marking and Closure are two basic macromemetic concepts, which have a lot of bearing on memetic design, by the way. Marking refers to how easily the deployment of a meme is about to be perceived by other agents. See papers about Blue Shirt Tuesday and the Koffee Klatch for contrast, also the short story Electoral College Professor from Other Worlds anthology. Closure is not unrelated to marking, in that it describes how clear it is that a memetic exchange is completed. This has bearing on resisdual memetic debt and memetic loops (10).

(10) Residual Memetic Debt and Memetic Loops. When an agent deploys a meme, she expects some kind of reply (could be a specific one, or any of a list of possible ones). Being ignored is the worst possible outcome. People would rather be hurt than ignored, and having no memetic recourse to response from other people can lead to violence. One way to prevent outbursts of violence is to ensure that at least some memetic channel is open for all people. A memetic loop is a completed memetic exchange. When an agent deploys a meme, she "opens a memetic loop" which is only closed when the transaction is completed. Opening a loop "incurs memetic debt" which the deployer carries until the loop is closed by some response. If the closure of the loop is somehow fuzzy, or either side is unclear about whether it is complete, there is residual memetic debt. This concept was discovered in the Koffee Klatch experiment. Residual memetic debt has a number of deep ramifications for human psychology and economics, including why inflation is such a problem.

(11) Injection refers to introducing a meme into a cohort (population, memetic fabric). see (13)

(12) People like memes that have good marking and closure because they produce reliable rewards. They also like memes which appear to have widespread injection (adoption), since that translates into reliable response from the rest of the cohort. A simple and silly example might be a meme like, "Give me a dollar!" If there are ten people within earshot (in the memetic fabric) and I know that each of them will give me a dollar if I yell for it, then I may go for it. If I have no reason to believe that anybody will, and maybe have a good idea that I'll be bullied for it, then I'll probably decide not to. It's simple: we don't do stuff that's unlikely to get us what we want (and by that I mean memetic response, since we often do things that don't help us materially).

(13) Injection and Virility (or Success): Injection is introduction of a meme into a mind or collection of minds (memetic fabric). Virility (or success) is how readily a meme propagates through a population (memetic fabric or cohort). See (11). One would think that Injectability and Virility should be linked, perhaps like temperature and heat are in thermodynamics (one could imagine some new Fourth Law of Macromemetics), but this remains to be borne out by further data and elaboration of theory. It should be a powerful thing to be able to demonstrate a theoretical relationship between these two quantities (and they still need to be quantified with units, too, of course).

(14) Having to discriminate something, or having lots of people who are able to, makes for a meme that has poor marking and poor closure. A few people can tell if somebody's a Native or not, a lot aren't so good at it, and most are rubbish at it, makes for a meme with poor marking, not very black and white, for instance. Plus, a process for working out who's a Native or not might not converge very reliably or consistently, and so would be said to have poor closure.

(15) Resonance refers to how a population reacts to a meme deployed by an agent in that population. Reacting including doing nothing (which can be a meme) or any of a number of memes. A nudist disrobing in a nudist colony and nobody reacting is an example of no reaction being a positive resonance. Resonance may be positive or negative (16)

(16) The "positive" versus "negative" terminology is still somewhat in flux. No reaction, no resonance, is the worst outcome for a deploying agent. Being ignored is worse than being hurt. You could talk about "positive" being a reaction that one is expecting, one that "benefits" the initiator (whatever that means), or one that "harms" the deployer (again, whatever that means). So we have react/ignore and then harms/benefits and expected/unexpected. The most "significant" of these may be ignore/react.

(17) Polarization is where for a given meme, part of the population accepts it, and the others reject it, or accept some other corresponding "opposite" meme.

(18) A cohort may be thought of as a "population". The cohort of a meme or memetic inventory or memeplex is the group of people that are inured of that meme, in other words, those that are capable of recognizing it, responding to it, deploying it. A "memetic fabric" (8) in some ways resembles a cohort, but it is a collection of minds that are in memetic contact. So in principle there could be islands of agents (19) which share some of the same memes, but are not in contact such that they are part of a fabric.

(19) A memetic "agent" is an entity (typically a person, but these days could be a net bot or AI, for example, or even an institution such as the Catholic Church or the US Government) which is able to deploy memes, as well as maintain an internal memetic inventory and internal deployment decision system (20)

(20) A Deployment decision depends on memetic states which consists of a matrix of agents and memes, and the next state to which the system transitions when a given agent deploys a given meme. The state tells you that a certain collection of agents (a subset of the members of the overall memetic fabric) and a subset of the memes which those agents are able to deploy are all of the possible deployments that may happen in that state, and for each possible agent + meme deployment, what the new state will be. For languages, this looks something like a grammar. For instance, "The" could begin a sentence, and next comes a noun (from a subset able to follow "The"), like "apple." And all along there's the question of which agents are able to deploy which memes. Most agents might be able to deploy "falls" next, perhaps fewer "of my eye."

(21) A memeplex is a collection of memes, c.f. Susan Blackmore, et al. I use this term interchangeably with "memetic system." When I use the term, I mean a collection of memes that work together, in which every one of the memes interacts with the others to some degree. The words in a language are an example, and a random collection of words across two or more languages are an example of a collection of memes that are not a memeplex or memetic system, since they cannot all be used together and thereby do not support each other as part of a single system.

(22) Immunomenes (see also Immunomemeplex) are memes which become available as the result of "bullying opportunities." The First Law of Immunomemetics states that any stable memetic system contains an immunomemetic system (which prevents it from changing). The successful deployment of novel memes ultimately results in the mutation of a memetic system. If there are no memes which allow cohort members to deploy negative memes ("to bully") other cohort members for this, then the memeplex will be unstable. By contrast, if such novel deployments can be stopped, then the memeplex will be more stable, resistant to mutation over time. The "carrying capacity" of a memetic fabric is limited, so if new memes appear and grow, they will undermine existing memeplexes, weakening them if not replacing them outright. An interesting memetic design approach for preventing this is Packing the Memespace (22.1).

(22.1) Packing the Memespace. Early IBM pesonnel management affords and interesting example, by the way. The "memespace" is a kind of catch-all term, loosely interchangeable with "memetic inventory," but meaning the inventory of active memes in a given fabric. Brains can only hold so many memes for active use, so there is the possibility of memes pushing their way in and pushing others out. Packing the Memespace is about deliberately creating "junk memes" (like "junk genes" that don't code to any proteins) within a given memeplex. The object is two-fold: make sure that "our memeplex" is running as much as possible (if a brain goes into another memeplex, who known when it'll come back), and starve other memeplexes out of space in the memespace. These junk memes also serve to connect our "functional" memes together, which serves the objectives.

(23) There may well be a concept of "anti-alliances" in which there are agents or groups of agents, with special memeplexes, which do the opposite of what allies do. In other words, rather than making special opportunities and shortening pathways, creating special memetic states that help, "antagonists" would bring additional immunomemes to bear on the "victims" and even create "bad states" (being in jail, being held without charges, getting shot at, etc.) and funneling victims into them.

(24) Such are the dreams of people who have no power dreaming of what it would be like to actually have it. Of course, real people who have actual power still tend to find themselves in macromememtically murky circumstances, rather unlike those who try to imagine what real power is like.

(25) Contact memes, Memeplexes that represent a group to another group, eg, non-Mormons might think of Mormons as wearing black ties, short-sleeved Oxford shirts with name tags reading "Elder So-and-so" and riding around on bicycles. This imagery may be partly or wholly true, but there is much more of Mormon culture such as temple and Family Home Evening and so on that Mormons might consider "more important" and of which the non-Mormon might be ignorant and would not recognize as Mormon culture if presented with it. Interface Memes are memes which can act as ways for two cultures to exchange (limited) memetic information and can be thought of a superset of Contact Memes.

(26) The rubbish resonates. One fun example of how memes work is a pretendian could try is saying something like, "You know, not all native tribes say 'How' or use a bow and arrow or wear feathers in their hair." This comment resonates with how the listener may actually think that all tribes are the same on these things, and that the deployer must be some kind of expert by adding onto them. That's the way memes work. It's not how facts or logic or reality works, however, and that's partly the point.

(27) The ideal would be to design the polarization in advance so that the polarization is complete and that both halves are doing what I want. I call this the Miller Lite "Great taste, less filling" approach. You often find that only 5% of people feel one say, 5% the other way, 3% are aware of the question but aren't really sure, and the other 87% are unaware the question even exists. Liberation movements don't seem to do this much, though.

(28) a Pretentian is one who falsely claims to be a Native American, usually to get some sort of special treatment, benefit or consideration.

(29) Memetics (or micromemetics) is the study of how the human brain processes memes. This has been studied a great deal by many others (Blackmore et al), and I take that as a known quantity. My focus is on macromemetics, or the study of systems of memes and the exchange of memes between large numbers of people. Macromemetics seeks to understand, in a qualitative, scientific way, so as to inform engineering efforts, human behavior in the same domains as semiotics, economics, psychology, public relations, marketing, sociology, political science, and others, and in fact is a sort of an "umbrella discipline" to all these aforementioned.

(30) An immunomeme is a loose classification of memes that work to defend a memetic system (21) from being destabilized when an "undesireable" meme is deployed. I have so far described three Laws of Macromemetics and three Laws of Immunomemetics, both of which I discuss in this essay and elsewhere. A simple yet pertinent example is a "no cursing" system. If somebody swears, this represents a "bullying opportunity," or the chance to deploy a meme such as "Hey! No cursing!" or "We're not allowed to say [fuck,shit,damn,hell] around here!" it's even stronger if there are secondary, supporting immunomemes such as "Yeah, no cursing!" or "Yeah! What she said!" to support the original deployer of the immunomeme. The idea is that if people are allowed to swear and get away with it, then the "no swearing rule" has no "teeth" and isn't really a rule, it's more of just a principle or something, that people are free to violate.

(31) A megamemeplex is a loose term connoting a very large memeplex or a larger collection of interconnected memeplexes. "Supermemeplex" is another such term. Implicit in this definition is that a memeplex or supermemeplex can be made up of submemeplexes, or the component subsystems that make up a larger system. In the end it's all a convenience for discussion, since a memeplex is a memeplex, so long as there are no isolated memetic pathways inside it (21), so it's all just a question of size.

(32) A memetic inventory is a collection of memes. Referring to a collection of memes as an inventory is useful when we talk about the inventory of an entire memeplex, an individual agent (19), a cohort (18), a memetic fabric (8), or of a memespace (22.1). All of the memes in a memeplex, like for example, all of the words in the Oxford English Dictionary, represent an inventory of all of the word-memes in the English-speaking world, but would far surpass the inventory of any individual person (agent), which would be another inventory. A cohort could be associated with an inventory, e.g., the list of people (who may not know each other) in the county who know all the names of all the local birds and snails. The inventory of such individuals, aside from their avian and caricolicular sagesse, may vary quite widely. However, if we talk about a memetic fabric (8) of agents who are memetically connected, in communication, we should find that their inventories as individuals match more closely the overall inventory of the whole fabric. A memespace (22.1) per the footnote, is semi-synonymous with "the active memetic inventory of a fabric."

(33) Memetic involvement can be thought of as how connected, bushy, connection-rich a network is. If there are lots of memes available to an agent, and lots of possible states to transition to, then there is a lot of involvement. If the agent has few memes to work with, and few ways to change the configuration of the system, then involvement is poor.

模倣子 Rebels, Non-conformists, Introverts, Extroverts, and Intent

 Link to the original post HERE  -- Memetic Essay Index 

I believe I do. I would be curious as to why you believe this distinction to be important. The Existentialist, Jean-Paul Sartre take, as I understand it, is that intensions are malleable, and may even be changed after the fact. So for whatever reason one goes out onto the pavement braless, shirtless, shoeless, whatever, one is always free, when nicked by the bobbies, to claim “I didn’t know the law,” “I was just playing at silly buggers,” or “I’m taking a stand against oppression,” regardless one’s thoughts prior to leaving the house. I would say that both Rebel/NC know the rules, and the consequences that come with them, whether it will be for instance (in the notation of the essays I hope to post later) InPublic:no-bra!scorn! or InPublic:no-bra!arrest!
The point being that Reb/NC both know the consequences of what they do, and choose to do them anyway. You could argue that the non-conformist does not intend to give offence or get arrested, and one might accord you that point, with reservations. Would Christ on the Cross pray for you, saying “she knows not what she does”? Maybe not. That is my point. Sartre might argue that at any point along with way you could say “I didn’t mean to give offence, it wasn’t on purpose,” and that intent is so much dross.
For the sake of argument (and in the essays I hope to link) in addition to rebel and non-conformist, I would add “criminal” (not necessarily that kind), as somebody who knows the rules, deliberately breaks or flaunts them, with the hope of not getting caught. The non-conformist might be closer to this, since the rebel hopes to get caught, hopes that the Empire shall engage him in battle, hopes to be arrested to make a point, while the non-conformist you describe (as I understand it) hopes for none of these things. So you could almost say that the non-conformist is a criminal, or a failed rebel (^>^).
Oh, I would very much like to hear about the kind of pushback you get when you go out braless.

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Hi Jay. I'd be delighted to tell you. The rebel is an extrovert (in Jungian terms). The non-conformist is an introvert (in Jungian terms). This may be a very important distinction to someone interested in psychology and wanting to be able to understand their motivations or predict their future behaviour.

The Rebel and Non-Conformist may have acted the same way in this instance - perhaps both breaking the law - but that may not always be the case. On another occasion, when the law is justified, the rebel may continue to take the 'criminal' route and break the law. But the non-conformist, seeing that the law is in this case justified, may not.

Also, for me, I often like, respect and admire people who will make thoughtful decisions, based on their own principles and rational reasoning. I have much less respect for people who merely conform to, or rebel against, what society expects of them. That does not require such thoughtfulness and does not seem very principled. I admire thoughtful and principled people.

To some other people (maybe you are one such person), only a person's actions matter. It does not matter to them what mental processes a person went through to get to their decisions. But to me, it does.

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I don't feel that there's much daylight between what each of us is saying about rebels and non-conformists. I get that the rebel chooses to do "anti-social" things for the effect they will have on others while the non-conformist does the exact same things for his or her own purposes. It sounds like it all comes down to the importance of "intent." I've always had trouble with the legal concept of "intent." It seems unfair to make that an issue which changes the nature of the case, all else being equal. For instance, getting done for "possession of a shopping bag of weed with intent to distribute." If I say that that was barely a month's supply for me personally (true) and everybody should keep away from my stash (absolutely), why shouldn't they believe me? It comes down to the court's ideas, whatever they may be. They might "think" that nobody could smoke that much weed in a month or even a year, or they might have some arbitrary standard as to how much weed is "too much." I would argue that both of those are unfair, and if you can apply psychological reasoning (this time Freudian) to the behaviour of an organization like a court system, it looks like "projection." They don't care what my real "intent" is--they're just pushing their own perceptions of what my intent must be back onto me.

Something similar may be going on when somebody confronts you with "I object to what you're wearing" (I don't know if that's the sort of things they say), when they may actually have some kind of attitude that "you're deliberately trying to upset me with what you're wearing," which again looks like projection. If we grant people the right, which you and I do not, to tell other people what they can and cannot wear, then we are also granting them the right to stand on their own convictions. This may seem like kind of a tangent, but we're really talking about vice laws, laws where there is no complaining victim, no damaged property (which would allow the police to intervene for cause), then it comes down again (more Freud than Jung here) to the individual who is going to basically "snitch on" or "dob in" a fellow citizen, and for that they produce their own inner justifications, as opposed to just hurting their fellows because they can. Most people feel too guilty and self-aware for that.

I guess if everything hinges on your "intent" behind your actions, and nothing else, then it also hinges on other people's intent, and nothing else. But then it all starts to get bedevilingly metaphysical, which I think is the last thing you or I want (though a great many others may well want it). You either have the right to do something or you don't. I would argue that you do have the right to wear what you wear, and I think you agree. So it doesn't matter what other people "believe" and I would further argue that "other peoples' beliefs" rather like "other peoples' intensions" are fairly meaningless concepts. Again, "It doesn't matter what you believe, it's still my right to do this, and there's no law against it." By standing on introversion and extroversion and "intent," you may be throwing that out in a very messy basin of metaphysical bathwater.

Over here in America we have a good quote from a previous Supreme Court Chief Justice, Oliver Wendel Holmes: "My right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins."

A sentiment which has unfortunately gone out of vogue over here over the past few decades, where people have gotten the idea that people are somehow not to do as they see fit so long at it doesn't harm others, and that they (or somebody--that's the bedeviling bit) have the right, even duty, to tell others what to do based on some arbitrary standard that doesn't seem to be clearly written down anywhere. Back in the day a Good American of any gender persuasion would thank somebody like you who was going braless or suchlike for expressing freedoms that kept them available for everybody. We used to be a people who held to the idea that when one person's freedom is injured, we are all injured. That's my ideal, anyway. Like I said, not so much these days, to our deep shame.

We have another favorite quote from another Supreme Court Chief Justice, Potter Stewart, "I know it when I see it," referring to a "shorthand description" of "hard-core pornography." In other words, the arbitrary judgement, opinion, "intent" of those is power decides what's decent or not, what we're allowed or not allowed to do.

For the question of "is it indecent?" or "is it NOT indecent?" I tend to prefer the third question, "Why I we even asking this question at all?"

As the saying goes, the road to Hell is paved with good intensions. I'm not sure how that fits in, but there are a couple of sayings about intentions (or decisions), like "That and a 10p piece will get you a cup of coffee," or "Two frogs on a log, one of them decides to jump into the pond, how many frogs on the log? Answer: still two. A decision is not an action (or measurable)." I guess it would be that the fact of having intensions does not correlate reliably to outcomes. Plus, intensions are difficult to measure, impossible to do so reliably.

Back to the courts and the law for a moment. Ideally, in order to prove "intent," a prosecutor would want to have some kind of document, witness, telephone wiretap, receipt for the purchase of weapons/tools used in the crime, or other records in order to demonstrate that the accused had thought about what they were going to do before they did it. Why is this important from a legal point of view? I'm not sure, but you could say that there was time and opportunity for the accused to change his or her mind, people who could've advised them against the criminal action, whose advice they did not take. You could argue that they could've planned how to avoid consequences of their planned action as well, and there might be documentation for that.

But just to say "they had intent" doesn't work. Just the same as if there were mountains of evidence that a prisoner had planned a crime in advance, had taken well-documented and specific actions to prepare for the crime, and to avoid detection and the consequences, or even had conspired with others, then how much value is the accused protestations that "I didn't intend to do it"? Very little, I think would be the obvious answer.

A rebel tends to conspire with others, so that makes them an extrovert, I suppose. By the same token, in undertaking his or her sometimes "criminal" actions, the non-conformist operates on his or her own, not involving others. So I agree with your connection there. I feel like it might be a circular one, however.

I question whether invoking the introvert/extrovert distinction solves the metaphysical problem of whether "intent" or "mens rea" (criminal mind) draws a meaningful distinction between whether one is a rebel or a non-conformist. I may not be up to speed on the sort of neuropsychological testing is available and would be involved in determining whether one is introverted or extroverted. I suffer from bipolar disorder, and we know this because I have the symptoms and when I take the medications indicated for the condition, said symptoms improve, as expected. I would argue that no such discrimination may be made for intro/extroversion, and that it must be entirely observational. Hence, we see all the time things like, "Oh, hey, I saw Jay at the bar last night. He did a ten-minute stand-up set at the open mic. Really? Are you sure it was Jay? He's such an introvert. He never talks to people at work, and never says anything at meetings, and he just goes home after work. Well, I guess you had him figured wrong, 'cause he was up there and had a whole room full of people laughing." And this is a very real problem in psychology and psychotherapy and psychodiagnostics, trying to work out what's really going on with people. Also, if Jay is quiet at work, but does stand-up, one suggests introversion, the other points strongly to extroversion (someone who's desperately socially awkward cannot get up in front of a bunch of people and tell jokes, right?), but then again maybe he's both, or maybe when he does these "outgoing" or extroverted things he's really "feeling lonely" on the inside. In short, I would argue that extroversion and introversion can be little more than "shorthands" for a collection of observed behaviors, more label than predictor, so to speak.

I might further suggest that going braless is an extroverted behavior, regardless of "intent," since it's an externally visible behavior. If you're doing something that other people can observe, in an environment where they can interact with you, then it is by definition an extroverted behavior, and so by extension, you are a "rebel" (per our definition thus far). If you do it in such a way that others cannot discern (and I have friends who don't wear bras, haven't for years, but I only know because they told me), then and only then, I would argue, could it be a purely introverted, non-conformist action. By being overt in one's "anti-social" actions, one also supports other rebels who are either doing it as well, or are considering it. Doing something non-conformist, hidden from view, does not give this sort of aid and comfort to other non-conformists (or to rebels), as by that token as well, does not constitute "rebellion" (at least not "open" rebellion).

In my work I have used the term "rebel" to describe somebody who knows what the "intention" of the "system of rules" is meant to be, and follows some select few of them in a sort of "there's no rule against that" or "Oh, I guess he does have a license to do that," not as intended sort of way. For example, wearing one's T-shirt over one's Oxford shirt, turning one's school jacket inside out (like in The Fresh Prince of Bel Air), not wearing a bra, not buttoning up all of the buttons on your shoe, and so on. I don't really make a distinction of a "non-conformist" because "intent" borders on the metaphysical and is impossible to measure. You can measure whether somebody claims to have some intent or other, so that can be part of a model. It's like Matthew 21:28-32. If you say you won't do it but end up doing it, that's what counts, and saying you will and not doing it isn't worth a damn. And, tellingly, God is the only one who really knows the whole story, which is the problem I have with assigning predictive power, as opposed to purely descriptive shorthand status, to things like introvert and extrovert.

One thought I had was "is Great Britain an imperialist country?" The have the OBE, which is kind of a dead giveaway, but it doesn't prove anything. If you get awarded an OBE, it doesn't make Great Britain an Empire if it isn't. Also, to be an empire, you actually have to take over other countries and take their shit and send it back to Blighty to enrich yourself. Finally, you have to have an imperialistic legal, government, economic, and religious system (which should be there if the second box is ticked).  I think we can tick the box on both of those for Great Britain. My point would be is that the third one is perhaps the most important. It's harder to point the finger at America, for instance, because you have to look a bit harder to see the structural system, they don't hand out medals and pat themselves on the back (as much?) about what a great empire they are, but do they control other countries and take their shit?  Maybe? Sometimes it looks like it? My point is that just calling yourself an empire doesn't make it so, and NOT calling yourself an empire doesn't make it not so, either. It's more about history, but even still that has to be matched to some kind of system which can also be objectively verified. By the same token, saying something like "I'm an introvert, therefore anything I do is only about me and not about how it's going to affect other people," is also taking a purely descriptive designation and turning it around and making it predictive.

So, yes, you can describe the difference between a "rebel" and a "non-conformist" in words, but the difficultly in objectively distinguishing the two may drain the distinction of much of its meaning. It appears to be a metaphysical problem. Once again, Jean-Paul Sartre (Les Mains Sales) points out that intentions are malleable, fleeting, you can say you did something for one reason one day and say you did it for something different the next and it changes nothing. It's also puzzling to see people who have different religions, different worldviews, etc., showing up for work and working side by side, their work not being affected one way or another despite huge differences in their respective "beliefs." Similarly, if you saw another woman running around braless, dressed quite the same as you, acting no different, would you assume that the inside of her mind was identical to yours, her attitude towards the clothes she was wearing, at least, was identical, or would all bets be off?
[SPOILER ALERT]
That's one ringing image that one gets from the last few pages of Of Human Bondage when Philip Carey, now a doctor, grown to an adult, back in England, is treating a boy who also has a club foot, but is not bothered by it at all, while Philip's own club foot tormented him and defined him his whole life. He wondered at where the difference could be, if not in the deformity itself. 
[END SPOILER]

"That which I say and do, however an inaccurate or incomplete picture of me it may draw, is all that others see."